Currently, with the rapid development of the Internet, video services based on the open Internet are also rapidly popularized. Generally, an Internet video publisher provides a video play service to a terminal user by using a network provided by a telecommunications operator, where the telecommunications operator is only responsible for transmitting a video, and does not set foot in control, distribution, a copyright, and the like of video content.
In the prior art, video transmission is performed based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Specifically, when expecting to watch a video provided by an Internet video publisher (for example, a video website), a user sends an HTTP message to a telecommunications operator (for example, a gateway device) by using a piece of user equipment, where the HTTP message carries a uniform resource locator (URL) corresponding to the video that the user expects to watch, and the telecommunications operator may forward the HTTP message to the Internet video publisher (for example, a video server of the video website), to obtain the video from the Internet video publisher and deliver the video to the user equipment.
To enhance user experience and shorten a waiting time for a user to watch a video, a telecommunications operator generally disposes a caching device, to cache a video acquired from an Internet video publisher, and establishes an entry of a mapping relationship between each acquired video and each URL, so that when an HTTP message carrying a URL the same as that of the cached video is received, the video may be acquired from the caching device and delivered to a piece of user equipment.
However, the entry of a mapping relationship is generated based on a complete URL, or, the caching device completes indexing each video based on a complete URL, and a manner of using a complete URL as a caching index is very inefficient because a special action of the Internet video publisher does not comply with any standard specification.
For example, generally a URL of a video is generated dynamically by an Internet video publisher. For example, when watching a video, a user may perform a dragging action, and each drag triggers a piece of user equipment to send a new HTTP message to a telecommunications operator, to acquire a video segmentation corresponding to the dragging action. These HTTP messages may carry different URLs that are allocated by the Internet video publisher, and these URLs actually all correspond to a same video, but correspond to different specific clips. Therefore, a case in which a same video is repeatedly cached for multiple times, multiple URLs of the same video are requested, and only some of the URLs can be hit in a cache may exist, which severely reduces caching efficiency of a caching device and increases a processing burden of the caching device.